Identity governance and administration is becoming a central security discipline as organisations add cloud services, automation and artificial intelligence. The question is no longer simply who has access, but whether access is justified, current, observable and accountable throughout the identity lifecycle.
That creates a practical problem for security teams. Identity data is distributed across directories, SaaS platforms, infrastructure and specialist tools, while access decisions still need to be made quickly. Manual reviews and disconnected provisioning create entitlement drift, orphaned accounts and audit friction.
Why sustainable IGA is difficult in the cloud
Cloud environments expose the limits of governance programmes built around a few on-premises directories. Applications, workloads and data services can be created quickly while ownership and entitlement information lags behind.
A sustainable model needs clear sources of truth for workforce identity, organisational structure and application ownership. Reconciliation should detect accounts and entitlements outside approved workflows.
Measure control effectiveness
Useful indicators include stale entitlement age, deprovisioning latency, review quality, orphaned-account counts and critical applications covered by automated lifecycle controls. New cloud services should have an owner, access model and review schedule before production.